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Ivo Skoric: two articles (long) |
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - <nettime-l-temp@material.net> is the temporary home of the nettime-l list while desk.nl rebuilds its list-serving machine. please continue to send messages to <nettime-l@desk.nl> and your commands to <majordomo@desk.nl>. nettime-l-temp should be active for approximately 2 weeks (11-28 Jun 99). - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - From: "Ivo Skoric" <ivo@reporters.net> Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1999 01:01:23 -0400 Subject: two articles TWO ARTICLES THAT PUT THINGS IN PERSPECTIVE: -------------- LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE'S RECONSTRUCTION (from www.iwpr.net) Serbia is rebuilding its bridges--and its minds. Academics are reviving the spirit of Brezhnev. China supports Yugoslav Prime Minister Momir Bu La To Vic. And our president boasts: "Our country is the freest and most democratic in the world." By Petar Lukovic in Belgrade We have triumphantly defeated NATO, defended Kosovo, and managed to return the United Nations to its rightful place. Now we have embarked on the glorious Reconstruction. "It is quite possible that the results of the Reconstruction will be a positive surprise not only to us but to the entire world," Dr Mira Markovic, wife of the Yugoslav president, told Radio TV Serbia. The courageous Reform and intimate co-operation with "the progressive and democratic part of humanity," such as North Korea, China, Russia, and Belarus, have proceeded apace." "Our country is the freest and most democratic in the world," Slobodan Milosevic has stated. This is why we go on, why life continues. We preserved our sovereignty, confirmed our independence, and ensured that the American and French armada could not roam throughout our country. They will beg us to forgive them. Anyhow, state opinion polls say that only 25 per cent of the population want reconciliation with the NATO countries. In the first outbreak of the popular enthusiasm, Presidents Milosevic and Milan Milutinovic, the president of Serbia, competed over who would erect more marble plaques proclaiming the start of the Reconstruction. Television viewers were showered with promises that everything that was destroyed will be rebuilt by tomorrow. We do not need foreign aid, we can do everything ourselves, we are clever, we are capable, we have a wise leadership. We are lucky to be led by Comrade Slobodan. According to the Association of Late Soldiers, he "has grown into a world leader in the struggle for freedom and became a symbol of the resistance of the 20th century." In the post-victory euphoria, it seemed as if we had slept through 77 days of bombing. As if nothing had happened, as if we picked up from where we stopped on 24th March, as if it is true that only several hundred of our soldiers had died. As if it is self-evident that no crimes were committed against Albanians. How could we, the Serbs, who have only defended ourselves for centuries, harm anyone? This is the country ruled by dance-patriots from Radio Kosava (director and owner: Marija Markovic, the President's daughter), the newly- opened Bambiland of her brother Marko Milosevic, mother Dr. Mira Markovic and above all her husband, Slobodan. They preach that "readiness for the Reconstruction is such that it will be as efficient as the Defence." They are persuading us that everything is under control in Kosovo, that the dinar will survive, that reforms will be here soon, that the ruling coalition of Socialists, Communists and Radicals will look after us eternally. Just now Radio Belgrade is broadcasting frightening news that puts it all into perspective: a huge fire has swept through Sweden, the production of steel in Holland has dropped by 20 percent, the harvest has not started yet in the United States, not a gram of rice can be found in Pakistan. Everybody in the Czech Republic regrets having even started privatisation and demands a return to the Warsaw pact. People in Hungary are starving, the return of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena is being organised in Romania. Serbian academics are working to revive the spirit of Leonid Brezhnev. The Poles are demanding that Russian soldiers occupy Warsaw. China supports Yugoslav Prime Minister Momir Bu La To Vic. The North Koreans adore us. Cuba is sending us congratulations. At the moment the Reconstruction began, the Yugoslav president bestowed awards on more than a thousand soldiers and policemen, and as many factories and companies and their workers. The names of the lucky winners were read out for 20 minutes on the prime time television news. Only those who did not want to win were not awarded. Politika announced on its first page that it had deservedly won the "Honour of Merits of FRY" for demonstrating "patriotism, courage, self-initiative, sacrifice, humanity, solidarity, expertise, and a particular effort in fulfilling its tasks in war conditions." The Medal of Courage was awarded to "the defenders of bridges", a group of citizens employed and paid to tell the reporters of the state television Serbia that they are ready to swim in the Sava River if the enemy hit them. The medal was also awarded to the manifestation "With the Song against the War", in which all singers who were intelligent enough to open their mouths and deride Clinton took part. A number of lieutenants, colonels and captains of the People's Police have been presented a pile of decorations: the order of "the long barrel of security of the first degree", the order of "merits for truth covered two meters below the ground", the order of the "paramilitary death squad" . . . And then it started. The opposition rally in Cacak: 20,000 protesters. The demo in Uzice: 10,000. In Leskovac, erstwhile SPS-bastion, 20,000 furious participants who dared demand the list of those killed and missing in the victorious war. In Prokuplje: 5,000 citizens. In Novi Sad, 25,000 people on the city square. In Kikinda: 6,000 dissatisfied with the triumph in Kosovo. Rallies in Krusevac, Kraljevo, Valjevo and Nis are scheduled. The basic demand: the resignation of Slobodan Milosevic. Petitions are being signed. They say that the president is dead only no one has told him yet. But the government daily Politika has an explanation. It informs us that the president's resignation is being demanded by traitors, mercenaries, CIA-informers, fifth-columnists, moral trash, mondialists, minor politicians, internal enemies, deserters, cowards who fled from bombing, the so-called peacemakers, provocateurs, American sympathisers, the enemies of their own people. Meanwhile, Serbia is falling apart along the seams. It is ready to sell itself at the lowest possible price. It has gathered around the soup kitchens, and dived into garbage containers from which no one is collecting the garbage any longer. It is angry, and unable to face the truth: we committed crimes, killed, threw people into mass graves. We believed, as Politika had announced three days before the war, that there will be no more of "Shiptars" (the derogatory term for Albanians) when NATO comes. We wanted to "liberate" each Albanian from the ruined foundations of his home, and to repeat everything that we have so successfully accomplished in Croatia and Bosnia. As for me, I am sitting in front of the computer screen and summing up my personal decorations-merits: I was patriotically carrying canisters with water and patiently waiting in the dark. I heroically smoked all the cigarettes I could get my hands on and drank everything I could afford. I showed my courage in front of web-sites, waging my own information battle . . . It seems to me that something called civil war is inevitable in Serbia. The only question is whether this art-happening will take place tomorrow or in six months' time. "We endured the sacrifice heroically and we have always embarked on the Reconstruction," the voice from the radio is saying. But will anything seriously change soon? Are you kidding: it is summertime. Who could possibly topple the regime in this heat? Petar Lukovic is a Belgrade based columnist for Feral Tribune in Zagreb and editor of XZ, a cultural magazine, produced in Belgrade <www.beograd.com/xz>. ------------------------------------------ Reporting Kosovo: Journalism vs. Propaganda by Philip Hammond Throughout Nato's war against Yugoslavia, no opportunity was missed to contrast the propaganda emanating from Yugoslavia's state- controlled media with the truthful, reliable free press of the West. The contrast was used by Nato as a reason to kill civilians, when it bombed the Belgrade RTS television building in April; and by journalists as a way to brush aside criticism of British media coverage and Nato news-management. As a demonstration of the vibrant diversity of Britain's unshackled media, take the stories written as reporters entered Kosovo alongside British paratroopers on 12 June, carried in the following day's Sunday editions. This is what James Dalrymple wrote in the Independent on Sunday, describing the town of Kacanik: 'It looked peaceful and intact - except for the silence.There were no curtains, no ornaments, no door handles, no light fittings. Every item of value had been removed by the almost exclusively middle-class Serbian population and carried away in any vehicle they could beg, borrow or steal. 'Each small community held a mystery. Who had lived here? Serbs or Albanians? What had happened to them? The only witnesses seemed to be the packs of emaciated dogs.' Leave aside the fact that, if he didn't know who lived where, it would be impossible to tell who had taken the door handles. And leave aside the question of how Dalrymple knows middle-class Serbs 'beg, borrow or steal' motor vehicles. Instead, compare his report with that of David Harrison, writing in the Sunday Telegraph: 'It was the silence that gave away the horror. At first sight the beautiful little town of Kacanik looked peaceful and intact.There were no curtains or ornaments. Even the door handles and light fittings had been removed. This was not random looting or small-scale pillage. Kacanik had been deliberately stripped of everything that could possibly be taken away by the remaining Serbian population and carried off in every vehicle they could beg, borrow or steal 'In most cases it was impossible to know if Serbs or Albanians lived there. The only witnesses seemed to be the roaming packs of pet dogs which had somehow survived in the wild for weeks, now emaciated and savage.' Though uncannily similar, there is one interesting difference. Where Dalrymple's report gives the impression that houses have been stripped by their departing Serbian occupants, Harrison apparently knows the missing curtains had been looted, and that the looting could not have been 'random'. Quite how this insight was gained remains unclear, particularly if dogs were the 'only witnesses'. For Harrison the sound of silence evoked 'horror'. Others too had sensitive hearing. 'This is a land swept clear of people and the silence is haunting', wrote Ross Benson in the Mail on Sunday: 'Not a child cries, not a mother calls out. Washing flutters neglected on the clothes-lines. And the houses stand empty'It's eerie, isn't it?' said Lieutenant Nick Hook' Benson's poignant, evocative, first-hand account was equalled only by Ian Edmondson of the News of the World, who wrote that: 'at the town of Kacanik, the convoy entered a land swept clear of people. The silence was haunting. Not a child cried, not a mother called out. Washing fluttered neglected on the clothes lines. 'It's eerie, isn't it?' said Lieutenant Nick Hook' These reporters' apparent disregard for both journalistic standards and their usual cut-throat commercial rivalry presumably results from the fact that they were under the control of a Nato-run pool system as they entered Kosovo. Yet the existence of such a system was mentioned only once by one TV news bulletin (Channel Four News 11 June), in contrast to the way every single dispatch from correspondents in Belgrade carried the warning that it had been 'monitored by the Serb authorities'. The press did not mention the restrictions reporters were under at all. Instead, near-identical stories were presented as the unique eye- witness testimony of individual journalists. The uniformity of the articles quoted above is simply the most glaring example of media coverage which, throughout the war, was highly conformist. The case of Kacanik is a particularly interesting one in this respect. Within 24-hours of these articles appearing, Kacanik had become the setting for an international media circus, as reporters jostled to get to the site of 'the first major discovery', a mass grave which might contain 'vital evidence of war crimes' (ITN 14 June). Reports from the site raised more questions than they answered. The Independent (15 June) reported that two bodies were buried under only a few inches of soil because the Serbs 'almost certainly ran out of time'. Yet they apparently did have time to place numbered wooden markers on the graves, to bury at least some of the bodies in coffins, and to dig empty graves 'for victims yet to come' (ITN 13 June). These peculiarities, and the fact the bodies were in a graveyard, were explained as the result of Serbs trying to 'cosmetically rearrange the site' to conceal the evidence of their crime (Newsnight 14 June). Estimates of the number of dead at Kacanik ranged from 81 to 172, but there was unanimity that the graves contained civilians massacred by the Serbs. The BBC's Newsnight (14 June) uncovered evidence which threw doubt on the claim that Kacanik's graves contained civilian victims of atrocities: a letter, purportedly written by a Serbian soldier, recounting a battle near the town, in which 100 Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas had been killed. But the letter, shown to the BBC by a KLA officer, was presented instead as damning confirmation of Serbian war crimes against civilians. Newsnight's reporter, Paul Wood, mentioned that the letter 'talks about a battle', but then immediately countered this: 'The KLA say there was no such engagement and that this text can be about only one thing: the murder of civilians'. The KLA officer who had produced the letter then explained, in broken English, what it supposedly revealed about Serb depravity: 'He feeled funny when he killed children, when he shot a Albanian with a 30mm calibre Praga. He write in the letter how is fun when he saw the Albanian chest was open from the calibre. You can believe it. The civilisation people, nation, can believe it, that exist human being who write and think like he does in this letter.' In fact the letter said no such thing. Not all the text was clearly visible on screen, but the passages dealing with the battle were: they ended with the line 'enough about me', and the letter's author then went on to ask after friends. Nowhere did he mention killing children or any other civilians. He wrote that one of the dead had been shot with the 30mm Praga, but in a tone of shock rather than 'fun': 'imagine a 30mm shell passing through your chest' (zamisli granata od 30mm da ti prodje kroz grudi). The letter did not resolve all the questions about the burial site at Kacanik, since it described how a bulldozer was used to dig a grave for the 100 ethnic Albanians killed in the battle. But it certainly did not confirm atrocities against civilians. It is easy to see why the KLA officer would have wanted to portray Serbs as bestial and evil, but it is less obvious why a BBC reporter should accept such a distortion of the evidence. Contrast this style of reporting with Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times. The only Western reporter to remain in Kosovo throughout the conflict, his articles consistently presented a more complex - and more credible - picture of the situation inside the province. Watson's 31 May report from Kacanik included an interview with Saip Reka, a member of an ethnic Albanian self-defence unit set up by the Yugoslav authorities in September 1998, and armed by Serbian police so they could help repel KLA attacks. But for British journalists, the idea that some ethnic Albanians could be pro-Yugoslav just didn't fit their idea of the war as a morality play in which the Serbs were evil, ethnic Albanians their innocent victims, and Nato the knight in shining armour. As one BBC reporter put it in urging tougher Nato action against Serbs, 'where is the middle ground between good and bad, right and wrong?' (16 June). Facts which didn't fit this simple-minded picture were frequently downplayed, distorted or suppressed. Newsnight (18 June) interviewed a Serbian worker at Dobro Selo colliery, where a Serb driver had been abducted only four days earlier, and where the KLA had already taken over part of the mine complex. Asked about Serbs fleeing the area, he began by saying 'the Albanians are attacking' (Albanci napadaju). Yet the BBC's voiceover translation had him explaining that Serbs had taken flight 'as the Albanians come home'. The mass exodus of Serbs was seen as an expression of their 'ethnic hatred', not as a response to KLA violence and Nato occupation. Similarly, while the discovery of a 'torture chamber' at a police headquarters in Pristina made headline news, the discovery of a torture chamber in Prizren the following day was treated very differently. Standing in the empty Pristina police building, reporters speculated wildly about what atrocities might have been committed there before the Serbs left. But the Prizren torture chamber left nothing to the imagination: KLA soldiers were literally caught in the act of beating 15 suspected collaborators, and the body of a 70-year-old was found handcuffed to a chair. Apparently this was not so newsworthy. This time, no British newspaper carried pictures of the site; the Independent, Express and Sun ignored the story altogether; the Telegraph, Times and Mail buried it on inside pages; and the Mirror confined it to the last three sentences of an article headed: 'British tanks roll in to halt final Serb rampage' (19 June). Reporters have found it hard to sympathise with the tens of thousands of Serb refugees fleeing Kosovo. One BBC reporter described them as leaving 'with their lips sealed, taking with them the dark secrets of ethnic hatred' (16 June). Matt Frei, sent by Newsnight to watch the exodus, seemed to relish the opportunity to gloat: 'Imagine the Serbs' reversal of fortune today: the rulers have themselves become refugees, shedding tears of departure and stashing the loot - two phones in the back of the car. Brutality has given way to self-pity. Overnight, the villains think they've become the victims in this war.' (16 June) Even as they fled with whatever possessions they could carry, Serb civilians were self-pitying 'villains' who deserved no compassion It seems entirely obvious that Nato would not be regarded as protectors by the people they had been bombing for weeks, yet the Serbs' distrust of Nato seemed to perplex many Western reporters. 'But why don't ordinary Serbs trust Nato?' the BBC's Kate Adie asked one Yugoslav soldier, before her interview was cut short by incoming gunfire. She concluded that the problem was not the bullets whistling past the camera, but that 'fear is infectious' (17 June). Another BBC correspondent observed simply that 'they didn't want to wait to welcome Nato to Kosovo' (11 June). As attitudes hardened even further, the Serb refugee columns were said to conceal war criminals, while even civilians had to share the collective guilt after tolerating 'genocide'. Journalists have seized on every grisly discovery in Kosovo with a certain relief. As Newsnight's Paul Wood proclaimed: 'for the Western allies, the steadily accumulating evidence of atrocities will be confirmation that this was a just war' (14 June). Yet even if all the atrocity stories were true and the official British estimate of 10,000 dead was accurate, this would not justify Nato's war, since all the allegations of atrocities relate to the period when Nato was already bombing. To present them as a retrospective justification relies not just on questionable evidence, but on the implausible premise that Serb attacks were not motivated by anything other than a fiendish master plan for genocide. Attacks on Serbs, if they are reported at all, are mitigated by being described as 'revenge attacks'. Would it not be just as reasonable to regard violence against ethnic Albanians by Yugoslav forces as a reaction to both KLA insurgency and Nato bombing? Similarly, the return of ethnic Albanian refugees to Kosovo was hailed as vindication of Nato's cause. The BBC's reporter explained: 'This is why Nato went to war: so the refugees could come back to Kosovo' (16 June). Channel Four's Alex Thompson enthused about 'the success of the US policy': 'after all, the President fought this war so that these people could go home in peace' (22 June). Somehow reporters have forgotten the chronology of events: there was no refugee crisis or 'humanitarian disaster' until Nato started bombing. One of a handful of exceptions to the general trend, Robert Fisk, divided his fellow reporters into 'sheep' and 'frothers'. In fact many journalists managed to be both at once, combining slavish subservience to Nato spin with self-righteous moralism. In this, they took their cue from the British Prime Minister, who talked incessantly of a 'just war' between 'civilisation and barbarity'. The historian of war reporting Phillip Knightley has noted how this crude Good versus Evil framework turned warmongers into peacemakers in Kosovo: 'In Kosovo the media tend to believe everything the military tells them because the military has stolen the moral high ground by claiming it is anti-war. It bombs in the name of peace, to save or liberate, so those who object are the war-mongers, appeasers, Nazis.' (Independent on Sunday 27 June) The photograph chosen by almost every newspaper to accompany the story of Kacanik was of a young female soldier sorrowfully contemplating the graves. Earlier in the war, Nato's role was illustrated with pictures of soldiers playing with refugee children and bottle-feeding babies. While contrived to tug our emotions, such pictures also carry another message: the most powerful military force on earth is really just a bunch of pretty girls and caring guys. As the bombs and missiles rained down we were informed by Nato leaders that this was 'not a war', and when it ended every newspaper found the same word to describe the occupation of part of a sovereign country by foreign troops: 'liberation'. This was a fitting climax to a media crusade which had frequently turned reality on its head in an utter dereliction of what journalism is supposed to be. It would seem that one casualty of the Kosovo war was British journalism, although some sources maintain it was already long dead. In its place we have propaganda. -------------------------